Palin: “Lie of the Year”

The much-repeated reference to an “Obama’s ‘death panel'” by Sarah Palin has earned the former Alaska governor the “Lie of the Year”, a dubious honor bestowed by the PolitiFact Web site.

The “death panel” reference, made by Palin on Facebook, took 61 percent from the 4,864 voters who participated in PolitiFacts annual poll.

A far distant silver medalist, with 12.3 percent of the vote, was the claim by Fox News’ far right talk show host Glenn Beck that John Holdren, President Obama’s top science adviser, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

On Facebook, Palin wrote: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity to society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

In the time, PolitiFact commented:

“We agree with Palin that such a system would be evil. But it’s definitely not what President Barack Obama or any other Democrat has proposed.”

Nonetheless, the Palin whopper received wide circulation. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, even talked about “pulling the plug on grandma.”

The third place “Lie of the Year”, with 8.7 percent of the vote, went to a claim by Orly Taitz that a birth certificate showed that President Obama was born in Kenya.

Biden received 1.7 percent of the vote for a remark made at a time when fears of swine flu were prevalent. The veep told NBC’s Matt Lauer, “When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.”